(“Text as submitted by architect”)
Alex Smith
Alex is a qualified architect who has previous experience working in Copenhagen for Julien De Smedt and in London for Hawkins/Brown, where he completed a series of innovative award-winning buildings, including the Cube Building in Hackney and Hilden Grange Prep School in Kent.
Alex founded [Y/N] Studio in January 2017 and has led every project they have undertaken with support from a talented team. Since its inception, the studio has been working on a diverse range of commissions, including carefully detailed residential extensions, 100+ multi-unit housing schemes, a large workspace in Dalston, a masterplan in Portugal, a mixed-use tower in South London, a footbridge for Network Rail, and a temporary tree house for Kew Gardens.
[Y/N] Studio completed the extension and refurbishment of the Bradbury Street workspaces, which face onto Gillett Square in Hackney. Bradbury Works includes around 1500 m2 of new and refurbished affordable workspaces and start-up retail units, which will help to ensure continuity of the unique and diverse community that has emerged since the square was constructed nearly 20 years ago. The project has been shortlisted for the AJ Architecture Awards 2023 refurb category and highly commended for the workplace up to £20m category. In 2023, [Y/N] Studio was shortlisted for the Young Architect of the Year Awards.
Alex and his team are active in teaching and academia and appreciate the importance of architectural education. Alex currently teaches at the Canterbury School of Architecture and Oxford Brookes University and examines at the University of Westminster and London Metropolitan University.
Practice Ideology
[Y/N] Studio is a creative platform established to ask questions about the built environment.
They believe, “The complexity associated with designing and constructing our cities is astounding and a great deal of architecture serves only to add complexity. We think the role of the designer is to question these established but convoluted processes and reduce complexity. We work with the various inputs, histories, technologies, and constraints with which we are presented to formulate a response rather than imposing an abstract theology, manifesto, or style. We, as architects, are editors of the process. The questions and the problems can be incredibly complex, but a successful answer should be as simple as yes or no.”
While disparate in nature, scale, form, and material, their projects are all characterised by a combination of pragmatic problem-solving and idealistic ingenuity. They call this approach ‘pragmatic idealism.’
Since forming as a company in 2017, they have been working on a diverse range of commissions, including carefully detailed residential extensions, 100+ multi-unit housing schemes, a large workspace in Dalston, a masterplan in Portugal, a mixed-use tower in South London, and a footbridge for Network Rail.
In 2019, they completed their first project, a carefully detailed prefabricated timber and glass house. Notable other projects include a competition-winning scheme for four coastal holiday homes in Kent, which are designed as a continuous spiral of floorplates to maximise sea views and reduce circulation space. More recently, they gained planning permission for their largest scheme to date, a 49-home mixed-use project in Strood that combines traditional vernacular roof forms with a traditional courtyard housing project.
In 2022, they completed the extension and refurbishment of the Bradbury Street workspaces, which face onto Gillett Square in Hackney. Bradbury Works includes around 1500 m2 of new and refurbished affordable workspaces and start-up retail units, which will help to ensure continuity of the unique and diverse community that has emerged since the square was constructed nearly 20 years ago.
The people who work with [Y/N] Studio are talented and ambitious, with backgrounds working across Europe for internationally recognised practices. As a studio, they are active in teaching and academia and appreciate the importance of architectural education. Director Alex Smith currently teaches at Oxford Brookes University, the University of Westminster, the Canterbury School of Architecture, and London Metropolitan University.
